Robbinsville police say 'it might be difficult to work' within new budget

ROBBINSVILLE — The police told council members tonight that the department is already depleted and might find it difficult to work within the 2013-14 budget proposed by the township’s mayor.

Police Chief Marty Masseroni said operations were already exacerbated by a shortage of staff -- three of the township’s 27 officers are out on medical leave and personnel issues -- and that has resulted in a shortage of arrests.

As a result, he said, “it might be difficult to work” within the budget.

Lieutenant Mike Polaski said that drunk-driving arrests in 2013 were up 50 percent and narcotics arrests increased by 15 percent, but he said the process was “one step forward and two steps back.

“At all these arrests, all these crashes, there has to be two officers every time,” Polaski said. “There’s no clear answer why there weren’t more arrests, but it’s not because we’re not working hard.”

With several officers required to report those kinds of offenses, it leaves the police department without an officer to monitor roads for traffic violations or other routine fines, Polaski said.

Councilman David Boyne noted that last year, the police department’s outlay was $181,000 under budget.

“That’s good and bad. It’s good because we didn’t spend the money but it’s bad if it means you didn’t have the people to work,” Boyne said.

Last month, Mayor Dave Fried introduced a $21.9 million budget that calls for a 2-cent tax-rate decrease, to 52.2 cents per $100 of assessed value. A taxpayer with a home at the average assessed value of $381,000 can expect to pay $1,992 in municipal taxes this year, a $76 reduction.

The reduction has been largely attributed to the Amazon.com warehouse planned to open in spring 2014. As part of a tax-incentive plan, the online retail giant paid $650,000 in rollback taxes this year, payable when farmland becomes a commercial property.

The tax bill doesn’t include county, school district or any additional governing entity taxes.

Looking for areas to save money, the council also looked at the finance department, which reported an $11,000 increase in “data processing.”

Business administrator Joy Tozzi said the bulk of the increase came from “cloud” computing services, digitally and wirelessly storing much of the township’s servers online.

“Because we’re a government, we have to save every single thing on our email server and it’s crashing pretty regularly,” Tozzi said. “We’re going to the cloud so we have unlimited space and can move that information up there. It will make our equipment a lot faster.”

“When we lost power at the building (during Hurricane Sandy), we lost our servers and we lost our email. We want to be able to back it up,” Fried said.

Township engineer Tim McGough said the township had realized some $80 million in new ratable property values in 2012. His department saw a $13,000 increase anticipating legal costs fighting a planned housing development on the 400-acre Gordon-Simpson tract.

Earlier this month, an appeals court ruled that Sharbell Development could move forward removing the age restriction on a 150-unit complex. At a public address last week, Fried said the township planned to argue against removing the age restriction before the state Supreme Court.